Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

The ‘merger’ of Penguin and Random House is, like all such deals, a takeover by another name. In this case, it’s a slow-motion takeover (it will take three or five years to be completed, depending on circumstances), after which either side can buy out the other. But given that it was Penguin’s owner, Pearson, that put its UK subsidiary on the block, and that Bertelsmann, Random House’s owner, starts off with 53 per cent of the merged entity, I agree with my friend Andrew Franklin, the founder and managing director of Profile, that, ‘It’s a racing certainty that the UK holding will be bought out by the deeper pockets of the richer German company.’ (See his comments here.)

The initial question is, ‘Why has this happened?’ There’s been a lot of company spin about it enhancing service levels and enriching content, and there’s been external commentary that, with around 25 per cent of the world trade-publishing market, Penguin and Random House will be able to better withstand the bullying behaviour of the major e-book retailers.I think both of these are smokescreens. Amazon would certainly find it harder to turn off the buy-buttons of a Penguin House, but all the trade publishers in the world stacked end to end wouldn’t put a dent in Amazon’s side.It’s much more relevant, I think, that Pearson has been under pressure from the financial markets for a long time to offload Penguin, and it’s been to its credit that it’s withstood these urgings. But the underlying reality is that trade publishing is a relatively slow-moving, low-profit business, and one that will be under enormous pressure for the foreseeable future. In the transition to digital publishing, with bricks-and-mortar outlets disappearing and physical turnover stalling or declining, the large houses are in a world of pain with their massive overhead costs and working-capital requirements.Their owners have to do something about this, and their options boil down to exiting the industry, managing decline, or expanding: that is, they can sell out; reduce their lists, their costs, and their turnover, by dropping imprints and shedding functions and staff; or they can seek economies of scale by taking over a competitor. In Pearson’s case, they clearly decided that they didn’t have the corporate will or the patient capital necessary to persevere. They seem to have felt that their best solution was to find a new owner for Penguin that would feel appropriate, and to disguise their abandonment of the business as gracefully as possible.The benefits for Bertelsmann are clear. They acquire a former competitor with wonderful lists, and immediately get the economies of scale from bulking up: jobs (and therefore costs) will quickly go in the physical handling of books, and in back-office functions, and there’ll be further ‘rationalisation’ down the track.The questions that follow this decision are more important and interesting. What happens next to their competitors, and what are the implications for the small fry in this story — authors, agents, bookshops, and independent publishers?I have no doubt that this takeover will trigger a wave of further takeover activity. Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins clearly has the will and capacity to swallow up one of its competitors, but News Corp is like an obnoxious rich boy with a history of bad behaviour that no girl wants to be seen in public with. I suspect that the only date it can get will be with Simon & Schuster.There are also geo-political complications: the huge French-based multinational Lagardere owns famous imprints in the UK and the US, such as Little, Brown, Hachette, and Hodder & Stoughton, while the large German-based house von Holtzbrinck owns notable publishing companies worldwide, such as Macmillan, Henry Holt, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It is hard to imagine either company agreeing to be bought out by the other.My guess, then, is that the Big Six will become the Big Four.For the rest of us, the results are even more speculative. For authors, there’s likely to be less choice as the larger houses focus even more on the pursuit of blockbusters, and stop bidding against each other internally. It may mean that advances will go up for highly commercial manuscripts, but they’d be likely to do so while they decline for midlist books. If this is right, literary agents will see this as a mixed blessing.Bookshops might welcome having fewer publishers to deal with, but I suspect they’ll have less bargaining power in their pursuit of marketing support. The large houses that remain may also be less worried about the further decline of physical bookshops.Independent publishers will also view these developments with some anxiety. It will make it even harder for them to acquire good books at reasonable prices, and will probably accelerate the trend towards global publishing. It may also make their dependence on large houses for sales and/or distribution facilities more fraught. This is a much bigger and more important subject than it might seem, as it is the key to the independents’ business model — and to the availability of their books.Big commercial books will always find their market, but all those other books we all need are only made available to readers by people who care about what they’re doing. That needs personal dedication — committed publishers, hand-selling booksellers, passionate reviewers and bloggers, and ultimately word-of-mouth recommendations. Anything that puts this ecology at risk puts our civilisation at risk, too.Henry Rosenbloom

William Smith O'Brien was a political prisoner at Port Arthur and had his own cottage and privileges. I drew the cottage as a pen sketch at first but then, because it was the brightest thing in a doleful setting, I painted it again in colour. Again function dictates form and I wonder whether the designer of the house knew what an elegant object he had designed?

Auckland’s art crowd literally crowded Warwick Henderson’s
airy Parnell gallery to celebrate the launch of his new book, Behind the
Canvas, on Sunday afternoon. As one of the major events during Auckland Art
Week, it didn’t matter that the sun was shining outside. Guests still came to
hear art heavyweights Hamish Keith and Ron Brownson talk about the state of New
Zealand’s art market, and endorse Warwick’s new book, which has just been
published by New Holland.

‘From the outside the
art market might seem a difficult and dangerous place’, Hamish Keith writes
in the introduction to Behind the Canvas:
An insider’s guide to the New Zealand art market, the first book of its
kind to explore the unknown territory behind the New Zealand art world.

While books on New Zealand art history are plentiful, Behind the Canvas delves into the art
market sales history, tracking the changes against world trends. Before making a
purchase, expert gallerist and author of Behind
the Canvas, Warwick Henderson, says it’s essential to know how our New
Zealand artists sit alongside the international crop and to have an
understanding of our visual art market, so an informed purchase can be made,
whether for a lifetime buy or acquiring an investment piece. Ranging from art
societies, public galleries and key players through to crucial events such as
auctions and art fairs, Behind the Canvas
recommends how to pick up the skills to navigate the enigmatic art scene in New
Zealand and understand the art lingo.

From making an entry-level purchase of an original print, buying
a work from an emerging artist or looking at a good-quality reproduction of a
well-known artwork, it can be difficult to make a decision in a market where
taste is always fluctuating. Although as Andy Warhol mused, ‘There are two types of paintings – those
that work and those that don’t’, it can be hard to differentiate what
constitutes good and bad art now within the modern spectrum. With these trends
and tastes evolving, mis-informed purchases can be a common occurrence. With
the help of Behind the Canvas and
your local dealer gallery, and a copy of an art magazine in hand, Warwick shows
you the tools to make a knowledgeable art purchase or sell an investment piece.
Warwick’s sought-after advice is now available to everyone in Behind the Canvas and his tips range
from bidder etiquette at art auctions, how to work with dealers in recognising fakes
and forgeries and even how to approach the world of controversial conceptual
art.

Behind the
Canvas is not solely for buyers
and sellers, but also for the creators themselves. Instead of seeking to make
their art commercially viable there are still many artists who function on the
hope that their art will sell itself; art critic Hamish Keith re-iterates this, ‘as any artist soon learns the least
valuable wall to hang their art on is their own’. Warwick gives advice to the
artists about how to connect with dealers, how to sell their art and gauge the
timing of trends.

The material in the book is intended to open a closed door on
the art market and Warwick’s amusing anecdotes of purchasing situations are
included to inspire and encourage readers, proving that the mysterious art bargain
can be uncovered with some knowledge and creativity!

Illustrated throughout with works from emerging, lesser-known
artists and some of the most significant New Zealand artists; Fat Feu’u, C F
Goldie, Don Binney, Dame Louise Henderson, Colin McCahon, Milan Mrkusich and
with two double-page spreads of contemporary art in a unique ’Around the
Galleries’ visual treat, Behind the
Canvas is an art world education for all.

Warwick’s
top tips for making an art purchaseGet real about your financial parameters and look
within that brackeBuy a stand-alone piece! Avoid trying to work in the
colour to match the curtainLearn who the key players are and where our current
art history sits internationalFollow international trends; read art magazines,
tracking big purchases, checking auction houses' websitesEstablish a relationship with a dealer and get advice
from themVisit your local public gallery to see both permanent
and temporary collectionConsider the advice – and take a risk! As the writer
states, out there could be the next Colin McCahon or Bill Hammond!

About the
author: Warwick Henderson initially studied art but embarked
on a career in shipping but through a series of coincidences found himself
rubbing shoulders with artists and auctioneers, who nurtured his interest in
the art world. Eventually he shifted over from cargo to canvas, and in 1986 he
established
the first art fair in New Zealand (Artex™) and set up an
award-winning gallery in Parnell, Warwick Henderson Gallery
(www.warwickhenderson.co.nz). With over 40 years in the industry, his gallery
has now hosted more than 250 exhibitions for leading New Zealand artists. He is
also a licensed auctioneer. Since 1985 Warwick has written on art, antiques and
collectibles for magazines including Home
and Building, KiaOra, Personal Investor, Carters Antique Magazine (Australia) and Antique Toy World (USA). He has also written essays for the gallery
in-house art catalogues. Warwick lives with his family in Auckland.

One of the stimulating things about the years at the UBS was the lively
humanity of almost all of the working relationships.
Jim McLean and Bill Thompson, the UBS auditors, were interesting and
likeable men whom I admired. I enjoyed working with them. One day in 1963 they
called me into my own office. They had taken it over to do the annual audit.
"What have you got to say about this?" McLean asked me sternly. It
was a sizeable bill from Meenans the liquor merchants, dated some months
earlier. With relief I said "That one’s quite OK. It was for grog we
needed when we launched Ron Mason’s book." "I don’t think you get the
point," said McLean. "Why weren’t Bill and I invited?" It was a
fair question. A hell of a lot of people had come to the Mason launch,
including many less deserving than our auditors. In fact I can’t remember now,
forty-odd years later, whether we invited anyone much. Perhaps
most of them just came.Ron Mason (right) was the Burns Fellow at Otago University that year. He was 57 years
old, a poet admired by everyone, but his reputation had been earned thirty
years earlier. Then he ran dry. The Fellowship, everyone (especially Mason)
hoped, would stimulate a creative rebirth. Month after month Dunedin people
were like clucky hens waiting for a blessed event that would do honour to the city
and the university. It was in this climate of expectation and anxiety that
Mason’s "Collected Poems" appeared.It struck me that this was a time
when the book shop could do something that was friendly, interesting and
popular - perhaps even profitable. I rang The Pegasus Press. Albion Wright
readily agreed to launch at the UBS. He would come and so, if I paid the fare,
would Denis Glover, an old comrade of Masons who had worked with Albion on the
book. Denis had grown up in Dunedin.

Wright and Glover were not teetotallers and their behaviour was neither
predictable nor controllable, but I knew they would do their best for their
friend Mason and I hoped their efforts would take as conventional a form as
possible. I wasn’t entirely reassured by a letter from Glover in Paekakariki. "My
dear Griffiths," he wrote, then lost control of his runaway pen: "Dunedin,
ah Dunedin, does that spire still swim heavenward, or will it appear
foreshortened? Built, I understand, on the town section generously given by my
great grandparents , who then retired to their Mornington estate. God, if I had
it now there’d be no First Church and no oil company building either. A great
big beer house cum brothel, that’s what Dunedin wants. Down with Chapman’s
monument, away with the peasant boy [Burns]with his bathrobe at the top,
hock the Hocken [Library], up with Princes Street, down with the Rattray
Street wharf" ! Subsequently, when I was trying to persuade him to
board the homebound plane I did wonder if he had seen First Church or anything
else of his old city except the Captain Cook Hotel and the sites of the two
parties.

By some miracle Wright and Glover did arrive in time for the launch - with time
to spare in fact. They spent it at the Captain Cook Hotel and turned up noisily
at the shop, which by that time contained the biggest crowd the UBS had ever
hosted. They greeted Mason with loud and cheerful eloquence. He was beaming. We
had the makings of a pleasing occasion.
Alan Horsman, head of the English Department where Mason was based for the
year, set the ball rolling with some thoughtful and generous remarks,
persisting manfully in spite of some loud and irrelevant asides from Glover.
Then Glover, first addressing himself pompously to "My Lord Mayor"
and other dignitaries present only in his imagination, pulled out a copy of "Squire
Speaks", Mason’s verse play, and read it from end to end. Mason spoke
modestly, his face wreathed in smiles. That was that, apart from another loud
contribution from Glover, warning all light-fingered booklovers present that
certain of the books had been mined to explode if disturbed.

The party went on and on, with mounting exuberance. Half-full glasses were
perched perilously on the bookshelves, in front of the books. Lots of people
became unsteady on their feet. I gathered our principal guests and set off for
home in Maryhill followed by a fair number of others. Bob Stables, with one or
two of the staff, generously stayed behind to clear up the mess and shoo off
the last of the guests. When Bob at last turned up at Maryhill he was as bandy
as anyone I had ever seen, swaying slowly from side to side and smiling in a
simple-minded way. He told me he had finished off a few of the glasses as he
tidied up, including, he said, a tumbler nearly full, which tasted strange and
very strong. It was the glass full of gin that Glover had left behind when I
took him away.Footnote:I am most grateful to John's London-based publisher (recently retired) daughter Kate for forwarding this to me.I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I did. It brought back many happy memories for me of John and his huge sense of humour and fun.John's funeral will be held atSt Matthew-in-the-City, cnr of Wellesley St and Hobson St at 1pm this Thursday, 1st November.Kate will not be at the funeral but she tells me that she will be " having a little wake for his London friends,
including Phil Thwaites and Patrick Wright."John would approve of that, Thwaites and Wright were both close book-trade friends of his.

Plenty
of book lovers descended upon Unity Books Wellington last Thursday night. It
was a truly buzzing launch of Kate De Goldi’s latest book The ACB with
Honora Lee.

The book tells the story of a little girl embarking on an endearing
project with her Granny, who happens to have Alzheimers. The story unfolds with
characteristic warmth, quirky, surprising humour and a rich cast of
'residents'.

There are some
wonderfully tasty recipes in Get Fresh and I implore you to give one or two of them a
nudge. I trust the chapters, through the words, photos and food, give you a
real feel for every single province. And I have also put together on CD a
soundtrack of the original and diverse music that I feel in some way befits
each region.

So put the disc in the player, puff up the cushions on your beloved
couch, pour yourself a cuppa, with a bicky, and drift off into the culinary
dream that this extraordinary country of ours offers up.

So with that in mind I have now had a chance to give a recipe from the book a nudge and the publishers have kindly agreed to let me reproduce it here for you to try if you wish. I can warmly recommend it.

Crispy-skin Snapper with Tomatillo
Salsa and Spiced marrow

Serves 6

Step 1. Tomatillo Salsa

2½ cups tomatillo, cut into 1cm dice

2 red capsicums, roasted, peeled,
seeded and cut into 1cm dice

¹⁄³ cup finely diced red onion

½ cup roughly chopped fresh coriander (leaves only)

1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh red
chilli

1 teaspoon Spanish smoked sweet paprika

1 tablespoon cumin seeds, toasted in a
dry pan and ground

1 teaspoon sugar

¼– ¹⁄³ cup lemon juice

¼ cup olive oil

sea salt and freshly ground black
pepper

Combine all the ingredients in a large
mixing bowl, seasoning to taste with salt and pepper. Add more lemon juice if
needed. Refrigerate until required.

Step 2. Spiced Marrow

18 pieces rampicante marrow (or
similar), cut into 1cm thick rounds

18 pieces zucchini, cut into 1cm thick
rounds

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon Spanish smoked sweet
paprika

1 tablespoon cumin seeds, toasted in a
dry pan
and ground

sea salt and freshly ground black
pepper

Place the rampicante marrow and zucchini
in a medium-sized mixing bowl. Coat with the oil
and spices and season with salt and pepper.

Heat a skillet over a medium heat. Sauté
the vegetable rounds on both sides until coloured. Transfer to an oven tray and
set aside.

Step 3. To Cook and Serve

6 x 150g snapper fillets, skin on

cooking oil

sea salt and freshly ground black
pepper

Spiced Marrow

Tomatillo Salsa

2 lemons, cut into wedges

Preheat the oven to 150ºC.

Take a skillet or sauté pan and place over
a medium heat. Take a sharp knife and score each snapper portion a couple of
times just through the skin — this will help the fish stay flat in the pan,
ensuring even cooking. Season the snapper fillets.

Add a little cooking oil to the pan then
cook the snapper fillets in batches, skin side down, until golden and crisp.
Turn and continue to cook the fillets until just done. Remove and keep warm
while you finish cooking the other fillets.

Place the spiced marrow in the oven to
reheat for 2 minutes.

Lay the cooked vegetables in the centre of
your heated plates, top with your snapper, crispy-skin side up. Generously
spoon the tomatillo salsa over the fish and serve with a wedge of lemon.And because I love (understatement) broad beans three pics from the book featuring them:

.Edward Stourton’s columns, recording his regular excursions with Kudu, the
Springer spaniel, appeared fortnightly in the Telegraph from May 2009 until
September 2010. They form the basis for this witty, charming and revealing book
of canine musings. Ed’s focus might momentarily seem trivial, but his canvas
proves to be immeasurably wide. Kudu’s small trips to the park offer big
insights into romantic attachment, warfare, guilt and depression, honour and
heroism, our sense of duty, beauty and the hard facts of life’s pecking order. Engaging and enlightening, Diary of a Dog-Walkerwill be utterly irresistible
for any man or woman with a dog.Diary of a Dog-WalkerEdward StourtonBlack Swan - NZ$24.99

Ian McEwan began his career writing sharp stories for the collection First
Love, Last Rites. Since then he has written long novels like the wartime
epic Atonement but has often returned to the novella form.
Amsterdam (under 200 pages) won the Booker in 1998 and in 2007 he was
nominated for the even more concise On Chesil Beach. Yesterday he wrote a
passionate -- well, this is McEwan, so in fact cooly analytical -- defence of
short fiction in a New Yorker blog.

In his last novel Sweet Tooth, his main character is
accused of being unmanly when he publishes a short work. (Is this, I wonder,
something to do with the word novella? How it sounds like the feminine form of
novel?) But, as McEwan rightly says, no one complains that a Beethoven sonata or
a Schubert Lieder aren't symphonies. He cites Thomas Mann, Henry James, Leo
Tolstoy and Herman Melville as masters of the small scale.

Presumably he chose these writers because they are most famous for their
behemoths. Has everyone who has tried Moby-Dick also searched for Billy Budd? Will a reader turn to War
and Peace ignorant of The Death of Ivan Illych?

McEwan has a point. "How often one reads a contemporary full-length novel and
thinks quietly, mutinously, that it would have worked out better at half or a
third the length." Even Flaubert, he says, should have shortened Emma Bovary's
death scene.

A novella is like a film. Both are consumable in under three hours: an
evening's work. They fit so much more neatly into our busy lives.

Personally, though, I rather like the unruly long novel: something that takes
weeks or even months to get through, that stays with you even when you're not
reading it.

McEwan ends his piece by saying he thinks Joyce's story The Dead
worthy of any 15 pages in Ulysses. But Ulysses started off as a
short story and grew into something monumental and wildly creative.
True there is something slightly embarassing about a Proust or a Vikram Seth
or a David Foster Wallace: do they have to take up so much space? But
while we can see an exhibition in an afternoon or listen to an opera in an
evening or read On Chesil Beach in an hour, no work of art lingers like a
great long novel.

Pearson and Bertelsmann, which are
merging their publishers Penguin and Random House, are confident of getting the
deal cleared by regulators.

Pearson chief financial officer Robin Freestone told BBC News it was a
complicated issue but their advice was that the merger would be approved.But he added that Pearson would sell "bits and pieces" to get it through.The companies said their brands, or imprints, would retain their editorial
independence.The merger between the two was announced on Monday morning. The new Penguin
Random House is set to have between 25% and 30% of the global publishing
market.Bertelsmann chief executive Thomas Rabe said he considered this market share
to be "reasonable", and added he was "confident we will get the transaction
cleared in the second half of next year".Imprint
independence Asked whether it was surprising to have such a big deal announced two months
before Pearson chief executive Marjorie Scardino was due to stand down, Mr
Freestone said: "We didn't want to be hampered by the handover."

Both companies have declined to put figures to the amount of money they will
save from the merger.Mr Rabe said "the imprints will continue to operate independently", but that
"there are economies of scale in back-office functions".Imprints are the names for the brands under which publishers release their
books.Random House recently became the UK's biggest publisher thanks to the success
of the Fifty Shades series, while Penguin has high hopes of strong Christmas
sales for Jamie Oliver's latest cookery book.But if you look on the spines, you will see neither Random House's logo nor a
Penguin.Fifty Shades is published by a Random House imprint called Arrow. Jamie
Oliver's publisher is a Penguin imprint called Michael Joseph.Maintaining the independence of the imprints is considered important because
they tend to specialise in different areas and are supposed to have distinctive
styles. Mr Freestone said that while they were trying to keep all the imprints going,
"The consumer has no real affinity with imprints - they buy books because of the
author.""There's an awful lot of costs not specific to editorial," Mr Freestone said,
citing accounting and human resources as examples.'Good weight'The headquarters of Penguin Random House will be in New York, although it
will retain its presence in London, where Penguin is currently based.Mr Freestone added that being part of a bigger group would be a good thing,
especially in the e-book market."In that marketplace it is important to have a good weight. There is a danger
if you're small that retailers will demand greater and greater discounts.Bertelsmann's Mr Rabe said: "Amazon is a customer of both and will continue
to be.""I don't expect this transaction to change that relationship."Responding to criticism from authors that publishers have never stood up to
retailers even when they were much smaller, Mr Freestone said: "Is it [being a
bigger company] a perfect defence? No. It can be quite tough anyway."

Returning home from a weekend with Agatha Christie in 1934, Allen Lane stood on a platform at Exeter station looking for a good read for the journey. There were none, and it was from this frustration that he founded Penguin Books. His driving idea was that his paperbacks should be sold at the same price as a packet of cigarettes – and have just as much appeal.

Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005"Good design is no more expensive than bad," Lane declared, a mantra that has guided the publisher ever since. Considering illustrations to be trashy, he set a simple thee-part grid, with colour coded bands – orange for fiction, green for crime, blue for biographies and pink for travel and adventure – while text was set in crisp Gill Sans and strictly marshalled into the centre.

This rigorous application of colour and geometry, as well as that wonky penguin, hastily drawn from life at London Zoo by the office junior, put design right at the centre of the brand from the very beginning.
"Penguin stood for a democratisation of design," says Phil Baines, professor of typography at Central Saint Martins and author of Penguin by Design. "It marked a change in perception, that design wasn't just for monied people any more. And they were always ahead of the game, always hiring the best people."
The arrival of German typographer Jan Tschichold in the 1950s and Italian art director Germano Facetti in the 1960s defined the innovations of these decades. Tschichold introduced a set of Composition Rules and strict guidelines for the brand identity, designing covers for Kenneth Clark's Modern Painters and the Shakespeare Series.
Facetti, who had worked for Domus magazine and Olivetti, sought out a new wave of emerging British talent in the 60s, including Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes and Derek Birdsall, producing a series of covers that came to define London's fledgling graphic design scene. He dismissed the approach of commissioning designs on a title-by-title basis as "the arty-crafty approach of the single beautiful achievement". For him, the consistency of Penguin's corporate identity was paramount.
"There was an almost paranoid obsession with the brand," says Baines, who attributes its iconic success to Lane's controlling fixation with Penguin's image. Designer Romek Marber developed perhaps the most enduring grid of all, beginning with the crime series in the 60s, which gave illustrators absolute freedom, but retained a certain order at the top of the page.
"The grid was important as the rational element of control," recalled Marber in a lecture in 2007. "The consistency of the pictures contributed, as much as the grid, to the unity of the covers, and the dark shadowy photography gave the covers a feel of crime."
His crime series stuck to a strict palette of green, overlaid with powerful black photographs, manipulated in various ways.
"For The Case of the Caretaker's Cat by Erle Stanley Gardner, the black photos of cats and the hand with a dribble of black ink give the image an ominous, rather creepy feeling," says Marber. "You wouldn't say: 'What lovely two pussies.'"

For those of us wired around the clock through digital devices, it’s ironic to realize that our parents and grandparents are the ones who have the best communication tools for a major disaster.

I’ve never been one to pine for older technologies but today I do. As Hurricane Sandy moves towards our New York City apartment, it occurs to me that we’re poorly prepared. We have food and water, yes, but no reliable communication tools.To be sure, our home has a galaxy of communication devices — laptops, iPads, iPhones, Roku, Apple TV and more — but all of these will fail us soon after a power failure. If the city goes dark for days, our home will be cut be off from all information.My parents or my grandparents wouldn’t be in this situation. They have landline telephones that can offer a path to the outside world even when the electricity fails. And if their phone lines went down, they would still be connected — through battery powered radios piping real-time information from Mayor Bloomberg and other authorities.Ten years ago, our house would have had both a telephone and a radio. Now, instead, we have iPhones and Pandora — both of which will fall silent in a prolonged emergency. Technology, it seems, isn’t always progress.

The Bookeller - 30.10.12 | Lisa Campbell

Google has announced a new tablet, the Nexus 10, which it claims has “the world’s highest resolution display”.
The device, made by Samsung, will go on sale in the UK on 13th November priced £319 for the 16GM model, with 300 pixels per inch, compared with 264 ppi that the Apple iPad retina display has. Google’s device undercuts Apple’s iPad by £80 in a direct challenge to the larger tablet market share.
Google has also announced a new smartphone handset made by manufacturer LG called the Nexus 4, to go on sale in the UK on the same day costing £239 for the 8GM version. The phone can operate as a games controller when wirelessly connected to a television.
Google also announced it would add music to its Google Play media store in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain.

Members of the public have voted Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson (Vintage) as the winner of the Independent Booksellers’ Book Prize 2012.

The children’s winner meanwhile was One Dog and His Boy (Marion Lloyd Books) by the late Eva Ibbotson.
Members of the public chose Winterson’s book from a shortlist of 10 while Ibbotson’s title won from a shortlist of 12. The shortlists were selected from titles put forward by publishers and selected by a panel of judges.
Meryl Halls, head of membership services at the Booksellers Association, said: “We are delighted with the range and quality of titles entered for the 2012 prize. This year’s winners, having competed against fantastic books in their respective categories, are outstanding favourites in UK bookshops.”
Winterson, described winning the award as an “honour” and said she was "delighted" by the news. She said: “This award is particularly important to me because independent bookshops are the life of the book business and those men and women who own and run them have read everything. They love books."
Marion Lloyd, Eva Ibbotson’s editor and publisher, added: “Eva Ibbotson, whose children’s books won many distinguished literary prizes over the course of her long writing life, would have been especially delighted to win one sponsored by independent bookshops. Her own beautifully-crafted stories helped to turn many children into lifelong readers, and she greatly valued the expert role played by knowledgeable booksellers in matching the right book to the individual child.” Ibbotson died in 2010 at the age of 85.
Last year The Hare with Amber Eyesby Edmund de Waal won the Independent Booksellers Book Prize for the adult category, and Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex won in the children’s category

Titles celebrating an astonishing range of sports - including football,
cricket, long-distance running, cycling, TT racing, squash and the Ironman
triathlon – will battle it out for this year's William Hill Sports Book of the
Year Award, the richest and most prestigious prize of its type anywhere in the
world.

Squash and the Ironman triathlon are represented on the William Hill Sports
Book of the Year shortlist for the first time, with Shot and a Ghost, the
autobiography of British and World Number One squash player James Willstrop, and
A Life Without Limits, the autobiography of four-time Ironman Triathlon World
Champion Chrissie Wellington.
Making the shortlist for the second time in four years is Rick Broadbent for
That Near Death Thing, in which he follows the leading racers of the world's
most dangerous race, The Isle of Man TT. If Broadbent goes on to win, it will be
the first time a book about motorsport has ever claimed the title.
Other shortlisted titles include: Running with the Kenyans, in which the
writer Adharanand Finn sets out to discover just what it is that makes Kenyan
runners so fast; Be Careful What You Wish For, the story of Simon Jordan, the
life-long Crystal Palace fan who bought the club with his self-made millions,
only to lose nigh on everything when it went into administration in 2010; and
Fibber in the Heat by comedian Miles Jupp, which follows the The Thick of It
star as he bluffs his way into the cricket press corps during England's Test
series in India.
The shortlist is completed by The Secret Race, in which former professional
road cyclist, Tyler Hamilton and journalist Daniel Coyle expose the hidden world
of doping and cover-ups in the Tour de France, claimed to be the most damning
indictment yet of Tour winners such as Tyler's former teammate, Lance
Armstrong.
The shortlist in full:
· That Near-Death Thing – Inside the TT: The World's Most Dangerous
Race by Rick Broadbent (Orion)
· Running with the Kenyans – Discovering The Secrets of the Fastest
People on Earth by Adharanand Finn (Faber)
· The Secret Race – Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France:
Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle
(Bantam Press)
· Be Careful What You Wish For by Simon Jordan (Yellow Jersey)
· Fibber in the Heat by Miles Jupp (Ebury Press)
· A Life Without Limits – A World Champion's Journey by Chrissie
Wellington, with Michael Aylwin (Constable & Robinson)
· Shot and a Ghost: A Year in the Brutal World of Professional Squash
by James Willstrop with Rod Gilmour (James Willstrop / Rod Gilmour)
William Hill spokesman and co-founder of the Award, Graham Sharpe said: "From
a record entry of 165 titles, the judges have produced a magnificently varied
list of seven readable, remarkable and worthy contenders. The subject matter
encompasses the entire emotional gamut from comedy to tragedy."Now in its 24th year, the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award is the
world's longest established and most valuable literary sports-writing prize. As
well as a £24,000 cash prize, the winning author will receive a £2,000 William
Hill bet, a specially-commissioned hand-bound copy of their book and a day at
the races.
The judging panel for this year's award consists of broadcaster and writer
John Inverdale; footballer and chairman of the Professional Footballers'
Association, Clarke Carlisle, who joins the judging panel for the first time;
broadcaster Danny Kelly; award-winning journalist Hugh McIlvanney; and columnist
and author, Alyson Rudd. Chairman of the judging panel is John Gaustad,
co-creator of the award and founder of the Sportspages bookshop.
The winner will be announced at a lunchtime reception at Waterstones
Piccadilly (London), Europe's largest bookstore, on Monday 26th November.

All my life I have found great pleasure in books, and it has
always been my intention to join a book discussion group. Until now, I have
never found a group prepared to take books for young people seriously.

Last month I found my ideal group. Te Tai Tamariki The
Children’s Literature Trust offered a chance to join interested people in a
discussion on The Duck in the Gun, by Joy Cowley and Robyn Belton, as
well as When the Empire Calls by Ken Catran. We had a lovely
wide-ranging discussion, with all kinds of surprising bits of information about
both books bobbing up. It was an evening that was of great benefit to school
librarians and teachers but could be enjoyed by anybody. It was informative. It
was relaxed. It was fun. It was my ideal book chat group.

There was only one drawback – not many people came. In fact,
if we don’t get better numbers, there may not be any more of these gatherings.
So here are the details of the final discussion group. I’ll see you there.

The time: 6.30pm

The date: 7 November 2012

The place: Children’s Bookshop, 227 Blenheim Road
Christchurch

(next to the Mad Butcher, lots of parking)

The books: Works of Margaret Mahy. What’s your
favourite? What special memories do they evoke? Shall we talk about
the three new books – Man from the land of Fandango, Mister Whistler, Footsteps
through the fog?

Press Release

Profile Books has acquired the publishing of the
prize-winning independent, Tindal Street Press.From 1 November the Birmingham-based independent's backlist and frontlist
titles will form a Tindal Street imprint within Profile Books, overseen by
Serpent's Tail publisher Hannah Westland.Tindal Street Press Director Alan Mahar says: 'We're proud of what we've
achieved during Tindal Street Press's fourteen years of independent publishing
in Birmingham. We found new English writers and published them with conviction
and flair, earning prize-listings for the Man Booker, Orange and Commonwealth
Writers' Prizes, a British Book Award and two Costa Prize winners. We built the
Tindal Street name outside of London, with a tiny dedicated and talented
publishing team and a voluntary board. We had a close connection with our
authors, an independent ethos and a vision for our English regional list, in all
of which we were supported by the Arts Council England.
'It is genuinely a great comfort that Profile and Serpent's Tail will be
continuing our list and legacy in this takeover. They are great publishers,
independent and successful, and have much in common with our publishing
approach. I have no doubt Andrew Franklin and Hannah Westland will do extremely
well by our authors; the Tindal Street imprint lives on in London.'
Serpent's Tail Publisher Hannah Westland says: 'We should all be grateful to
Tindal Street Press for the way they have passionately published superb fiction
from all over the UK and beyond over the years. I have always admired their list
and the exceptionally high standards of editorial care, good design and clever
publicity that they have applied to the books they publish. Serpent's Tail has
always been committed to publishing unexpected and unusual voices from all over
the world, so Tindal Street joining us feels like a perfect fit. I am incredibly
proud to be leading our combined lists which together offer a range of books
whose diversity and originality I believe is unrivalled in UK publishing.'
Profile Books MD Andrew Franklin says, 'It's always sad to see the end of an
independent publisher but we're very pleased that Tindal Street's publishing
programme will be finding a home at Profile. Tindal Street have always punched
way above their weight and we will make sure they continue to do so. Profile and
Tindal Street Press share the same ideals for independent publishing and we
greatly look forward to working with Luke Brown and the Tindal Street authors.'

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

When a character in my recent book, “Sweet Tooth,” publishes his short first work of fiction, he finds some critics are suggesting that he has done something unmanly or dishonest. His experience reflects my own. A novella? Perhaps you don’t have the necessary creative juice. Isn’t the print rather large, aren’t the lines too widely spaced? Perhaps you’re trying to pass off inadequate goods and fool a trusting public.
Composers, including those of the highest rank, have never had such problems of scale. Who doubts the greatness of Beethoven’s piano sonatas and string quartets or of Schubert’s songs? Some, like me, prefer them to the symphonies of either man. Who could harden his heart against the intimate drama of Mozart’s G minor trio, or not lose himself in the Goldberg variations or not stand in awe of the D minor Chaconne played on a lonesome violin?

Strangely, the short story never arouses suspicion of short-changing, probably because the form is so fundamentally different from the novel.
I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who’s a genius on his best days). And this child is the means by which many first know our greatest writers. Readers come to Thomas Mann by way of “Death in Venice,” Henry James by “The Turn of the Screw,” Kafka by “Metamorphosis,” Joseph Conrad by “Heart of Darkness,” Albert Camus by “L’Etranger.” I could go on: Voltaire, Tolstoy, Joyce, Solzhenitsyn. And Orwell, Steinbeck, Pynchon. And Melville, Lawrence, Munro. The tradition is long and glorious. I could go even further: the demands of economy push writers to polish their sentences to precision and clarity, to bring off their effects with unusual intensity, to remain focussed on the point of their creation and drive it forward with functional single-mindedness, and to end it with a mind to its unity. They don’t ramble or preach, they spare us their quintuple subplots and swollen midsections.
Let’s take, as an arbitrary measure, something that is between twenty and forty thousand words, long enough for a reader to inhabit a world or a consciousness and be kept there, short enough to be read in a sitting or two and for the whole structure to be held in mind at first encounter—the architecture of the novella is one of its immediate pleasures. How often one reads a contemporary full-length novel and thinks quietly, mutinously, that it would have worked out better at half or a third the length. I suspect that many novelists clock up sixty thousand words after a year’s work and believe (wearily, perhaps) that they are only half way there. They are slaves to the giant, instead of masters of the form.

New company to be known as Penguin Random House will account for about one in four books sold

Some in the industry feared Penguin would lose its identity in the merger with Random House. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

It will now publish Fifty Shades of Grey and Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov; Pippa Middleton's recipe and craft book and Nigella Lawson's latest cookbook. Penguin, the most famous name in British publishing, has confirmed its merger with the German-owned Random House, creating the biggest book publisher seen, accounting for about one in four of all books sold.But the news immediately unsettled some in the industry, which has already seen thousands of bookshops close as readers increasingly turn to Amazon for printed and now electronic books.Andrew Franklin, founder of Profile Books, publisher of titles including Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves, said the deal was a "great shame" for publishing, and predicted that Penguin would lose its separate identity. "The myth is when you combine two great companies you get one even greater company," he said. "This will end up a complete takeover of Penguin."It isn't by chance that every Tesco looks the same. [Big publishers] love to promote diversity and localism, but that's not how it works."Authors' representatives were more optimistic. Kate Pool, deputy secretary general of the Society of Authors, said that if the new venture delivered on its promises to continue to invest in content and titles at its current levels, then authors had nothing to fear."If they keep their promises then it could well be that at the coalface it doesn't feel that different to the average author. If publishers are struggling because the sands are shifting then they need reinforce what they have always done well – good rights deals, good advances."Given all the other upheavals confronting the publishing industry, this is just a drop in the ocean."Founded by Allen Lane in 1935 to popularise reading with cut-price books aimed at the general reader, Penguin's 77-year independent history came to an end after five months of behind-the-scenes talks involving both corporations. The merged company, to be called Penguin Random House, will be a joint venture in which Bertelsmann, a media conglomerate controlled by the Mohn family, will retain a 53% stake. Pearson, which also owns the Financial Times, will retain the balance, with the two sides pledging to stick together for at least three years.The company will have £2.5bn in revenues and almost £175m in profits.Nevertheless, Franklin did not believe that the creation of such a dominant force would crush independent players, who account for about 44% of the market in the UK. "When you have really huge companies, paradoxically you leave more room for smaller, nimble players," he said. "Look at the film and music industry. It is often the big players struggling, not the independents."John Makinson, Penguin's chief executive, who will head the new company's board, said the rationale behind doubling in size was to help both publishers make the transition from printed word to ebook.Amazon is now selling 114 ebooks for every 100 printed books, helped by the popularity of its Kindle. "We are all worried, as the world moves to a more digital structure for content and distribution, that publishing could diminish, fewer books be published and fewer risks taken," said Makinson. "We hope to be able to offer more to readers and authors."This will give us resources, capacity and confidence to publish a broad array [of content] and to take risks. That is what good publishing is about."Pearson also rejected a last-minute, tentative proposal from Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp owns rival publisher HarperCollins, in part due to the fact that an outright sale of Penguin has tax implications in the US, where it has two-thirds of its business.Penguin Random House will be run by Markus Dohle, chairman and chief executive of Random House Worldwide. It was not clear what would happen to other high-profile publishing executives, not least Dame Gail Rebuck, the chairman and chief executive of Random House. Both companies promised more details in the coming weeks.The two owners are confident that though they will control more than 25% of the global book market, regulators will clear the deal. In Britain, the two groups' market share is closer to 30%.